


Sea of Years

by larkflower



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dalish Folklore, Gen, M/M, Slow Burn, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 12:04:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11379831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkflower/pseuds/larkflower
Summary: Deep in the great forest, the King of Tricksters dwells, living out the punishment for his sins. The Dalish warn: never cross the Boundary and trespass into his realm.When the First of Clan Lavellan meets the lonely god, he sets into motion something beyond all control.





	Sea of Years

Part I

 

* * *

 

 

He heard, too late, the warning charms tinkling in the breeze. The ones strung up by the clan: colored beads, scraps of metal, willow shavings, dangling from ropes fashioned out of elfroot, coming together in a chorus of _go away, go away, go away now_. The world spun gently around him in a mess of dappled light and flitting shadows. He hadn’t noticed that he had already reached the Boundary. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe. There, before him, the forbidden line. But he thought that it made no difference if the Wolf ate his heart now.

He could hear the human caravan faraway behind him, crashing through the forest.

“Elf boy,” someone shouted. “Where did you go?”

Branches snapping, dead leaves whispering. _I didn’t mean to._ He blinked tears out of his eyes and tasted blood in his mouth. “I didn’t mean it,” he said out loud. The skin on his wrists burned where it had been rubbed raw.

“You’ll pay for our hunters. You’ll fucking pay!”

Their phantom hands gliding over his skin and dragging a blade across his cheek, and a man with fermented breath crooning, _how’s that for a knife, knife-ear?_ It hurt; there were so many cuts; a dizzying wave of pain; fires like kaleidoscopes.

The voices were closing in on him, and then he leaned against a tree and doubled over, a thin stream of bile dribbling out of his mouth. He spat and struggled to stand. It had been a few days. Or a week. They wanted to have some fun, because hunting in these wild parts was harsh work. They fed him burned scraps and gave him water from a filthy sponge. Look at the pretty elf. Now his clothes were tattered and his face smeared with dirt. He couldn’t remember anymore what had happened – nothing except those fingers clawing at him, prodding at him.

A thousand campfire stories repeated in his head: never, ever go past the Boundary, where he waits, for children who stumble into his domain and straight into his vile jaws…

But instead: well before the Boundary, the humans had dragged him to their camp and dangled him in front of their fire, his feet unable to touch the ground while they surrounded him, all of them mocking him, firelight shadows etched onto their faces. He had screamed, and they were drunk so they thought it was funny. But then he kept screaming and they got tired of the noise and stuffed cloth into his mouth and then all that was left were the hot tears rolling down his face, and a wine bottle was smashed at his feet and the knife cut into his skin and they said _he’s crying, what a mess, Maker, well this is disgusting._   

More voices, the rasping of steel being unsheathed. Birds fleeing. The hunters were coming, stampeding their way through the choking undergrowth. 

He stepped over the Boundary.

The charms rang louder. The forest continued to hiss around him, but the Wolf did not materialize and tear him apart. Not eaten alive, yet. He took a few more steps and then broke into a stumbling run.   

In his head, he desperately prayed to the All-Mother for something to save him.

“Get the little devil,” a man said, and the sound was much closer than before.

“I didn’t mean to…” he mumbled again, washed over with dizziness. He tripped into stray branches and they scraped his skin away. Visions swam before him: his tormentors lying on the ground in pieces and in a sea of blood, while magic still flickered in his gut like a living thing. “I didn’t want it to happen…”

He couldn’t run for much longer. Now it was strange: the Boundary ropes were still within sight, but the forest had changed. The trees were bigger, more alive, and they writhed in disorienting ways. Snow-like spores hovered in the damp air. Streams of water flowed out of nothing and trickled up rocky inclines.

There were colors here he had never seen before, colors he couldn’t even name, garish in the dark.  

A sudden growl ripped through the air. The humans were still coming, scrambling over massive roots to advance towards their target, even as there was a second growl, louder than the first –

Completely rending the forest, piercing down to the bone.

There was nowhere to go anymore. His heart thudded.

From the darkness, it emerged: a hulking beast with six red eyes and wildly streaming fur. Wherever it stepped, ground detritus dissolved to nothing. It stalked forward and then stood there, watching. The Wolf was utterly still – yet chaos rippled through the surrounding air.

The humans had caught up. “You - !” one burly hunter said, but he clapped a hand over his mouth when he saw the Wolf.    

It swung its massive head back and forth, casting its gaze from man to elf to man, a tangible malevolence following its movements.

He tried to turn around but he was paralyzed. “Help me,” he said, although he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. The humans? The Wolf? They both were going to tear him to pieces where he stood, the weakest, caught between them.

The six eyes stared down at him. They seethed with red light, brighter than any livid sun… swirling around without cease. When all six of the eyes looked his way, he was transparent as glass and about to shatter. He couldn’t escape.

The Wolf looked away, and his body turned to ice. He was quivering, along with everything in the forest, attuned to a primal anticipation. Then the Wolf lunged forward.

_\- tears our young to pieces -_

It happened before he could react. There was a great shadow unfurling towards him and then in the next moment he heard behind him flesh tearing. Sudden, agonized wailing; trees glistening black. He couldn’t move; his body was fading away from him. Splintered chaos: people attempting to run, blundering through the trees, only to be met with a drawn-out crunching noise…

\- _devoured, never to return -_

Incoherent screams. He knew nothing about it, only the inviting darkness into which he sank.

 

*

 

Horrors were waiting for him in the dark. Contorted shadows licked at his feet. He struggled against tightening ropes. The hunters, with their knives, were laughing and asking their elf boy to do magic tricks – _come on, won’t you show us something nice?_  

But then someone shooed away all the monsters lurking at the edges of his dreams. Whoever it was touched his forehead kindly and washed his cuts, with a gentleness that was terrifying.

 

*

 

Dreams, dreams. Vague but somehow also more vivid than life.

Death? He thought of the humans lying broken on the forest ground, and wished he hadn’t, and tried to think of something nice: a bright clearing, his sister singing, the aravel silks.

 

*

 

He blinked. Alive. A jagged ceiling coming into focus above him. The stone ceiling of a cave. Shafts of light were filtering in through its cracks, and he was alive, swaddled in blankets. The comfort was disorienting. He was still waiting for the bloodstained forest floor, to find himself drowning in gristle and decay.

There was the crackle of a fire, the seep of faint warmth. He slowly turned his head towards it.

A young man was pouring water into a kettle over a fire. He wore a wolf pelt cloak drawn up over his head and draped over his back. He glanced at Mahanon once.  

Mahanon’s dizzy vision lost itself on the man’s quiet movements, the way he set down the water bowl and then leaned back elegantly. Soon, there came a faint bubbling noise.

Still caught in a surreal feeling - as if he was watching a dream or a play - Mahanon dared to whisper, “Who are you?”

The man didn’t respond, only sat waiting for the kettle. Behind him, the walls were partly covered in tiny, elaborate paintings. A few pieces of clothing were hanging from the ceiling. Wooden chests and heaps of straw lay around. This cave was a place where someone lived. Mahanon’s stomach churned and he struggled to not think too hard about it. The colors that had been waiting beyond the Boundary dazzled in his mind’s eye.

Suddenly, a hand eased him up and tipped warm tea into his mouth. He sputtered a little, but swallowed it. It was gritty and tasted like mint.

When there was no more tea, he asked again: “Who are you?”

The man said nothing. The cloak made it look as if he was emerging from a wolf’s jaws. Two gray eyes on a sharp face.

He helped Mahanon lie down again, adjusting the blankets around him. Then he left to go back to the fire. Mahanon stared up at the stone ceiling, not daring to move, trying to force himself back into sleep and its illusion of safety. But his body strained against it, pleaded to not be sent back into darkness.  

 

*

 

A human man’s entrails were spilling out onto the forest floor, which was then nothing, which was then the pelt of the wolf, from which the stranger emerged. Or those were Mahanon’s own entrails, he didn’t know.

 

*

 

When he woke up next, the man was on the other side of the fire, sleeping, wrapped in furs.

Mahanon slowly sat up. The man was still sleeping. Carefully, Mahanon shook his blankets off and crawled towards him, fighting the pain in his bones.

He held his breath. Upon a closer glance, the man seemed much younger – only a few years older than Mahanon. For someone dwelling in a cave, his skin was like porcelain. Delicate. Like his touch when he fed Mahanon tea and mashed up herbs and stew.

He was smaller without his wolf cloak. More normal. Was he a merciful hermit? A servant, a follower?

Or was this the face of a god? The face that could burn you to ash if you looked too long? The only kind of being who could survive in this impossible place?

Nothing happened. The sleeping man breathed in. Out. Mahanon scuttled back and buried himself in his pile of blankets.

 

*

 

In certain ways, his dreams – the shadowed beast, the humans torn to bits, the trees bathed in blood – seemed more real than this cave, with its dancing lights and intricate paintings all across the walls.   

The paintings were endless: tiny depictions of war, hunts, unfamiliar life. While the man lay sleeping, Mahanon stared at them because he couldn’t bring himself to move. With enough time, they seemed to flicker, alive.  

 

*

 

The fire was dead, and the man was muttering under his breath. He placed a palm on Mahanon’s forehead. Mahanon could hear himself whimper at the touch. The man made a shushing noise and said something about fever.

 “… the Trickster might take on a thousand forms,” an old woman back at camp was saying. Mahanon was petting a halla, mesmerized by its gleaming antlers… He blinked and he was on his back in the cave and the man was looking down at him with cool gray eyes. His hand had not closed around a halla’s white fur, but instead the man’s wrist. Mahanon snatched his hand back.

Then he was picked up. “No,” he said weakly, but he was already being carried. He was slipping in and out of consciousness. One minute the cave ground was lurching beneath him – _his gut lurching too, a wave of nausea, don’t, don’t_ – and in another minute, he was breathing in the heady forest air for the first time in days.

He was let down, softly, onto grass. A light breeze brushed his cheek. He could see morning light through the treetops.

Gently, the man seeped some kind of bitter herbal liquid into Mahanon’s mouth. Mahanon swallowed and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the man was gone.

Time trickled past, painfully slow. His head felt swollen, too hot. Maybe he had been left to die. Or the humans were returning, with their torches and knives, coming for their revenge. Phantom insects crawled over his legs. He tried to kick them, but he couldn’t move, wouldn’t be able to run away.

What seemed like hours had gone by before he heard someone in the distance cry out, “Mahanon!”

Soft footsteps. His mother, running towards him? That was impossible.

He was lifted up – it was the Keeper who held him in her arms. She brushed dark, matted hair out of his face.

“What happened, da’len?”

Dizzy, he slumped against her chest. His throat was so parched. He saw blood, then the glowing fire. The eyes of a man that wore wolf furs and gave him tea.

“Mahanon, what happened?” she repeated.

A god, stalking through the darkness. Tearing humans to pieces with its teeth.

A man, sleeping in a cave.

Dreams –

“The Wolf,” he heard himself whispering, as he struggled to rise out of the fever haze. “The Wolf.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This is going to be a bit of an alternate take on canon folklore :)


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